Google Wonder Wheel
One of the best ways to do keyword research is actually completely free and not very well known when compared with other options. It’s the Google Wonder Wheel and it’s one of my new favorite ways to do keyword research online. Here’s what you need to know:
Using Adwords
The most common way to search for keywords to use for your posts is to use Adwords. This tool lets you check what people are searching for and it provides you with related search terms. The idea here is to help you pick which keywords to target for your Adwords campaign, however it’s also useful to help you search for keywords for your SEO work. The service is also free so everyone tends to use it.
The thing is, Adwords is not designed around organic SEO. It’s designed very specifically to help you with finding keywords to target for an Adwords campaign. This means that it provides related search terms but not necessarily related spokes of the search terms.
To understand what I mean, consider this: with Adwords, if you search for dog food, they show you something like pet food. However, they may not show you something like dog grooming, which is a related “spoke” of the same subject. The reason is that you are targeting a specific keyword with Adwords and not creating an SEO campaign.
Enter the Wonder Wheel
The Google Wonder Wheel by comparison is designed to show you trends within a general topic. In the wonder wheel, if I were to enter in the keyword dog food, then I’d see related searches, which include things like dog grooming and maybe even cat breeding. It’s much more board based and offers more in the way of trends than Adwords does.
How to Use Wonder Wheel
Basically, what you’d do in order to use Wonder Wheel is to enter a specific keyword search term and then run the search for it. The Wonder Wheel would then show you your main search term in the center of the wheel with spokes which jut out from the wheel showing you the various keyword terms which are related to your search.
The really nice thing about Wonder Wheel is that you can then use the spokes to generate new wheels. You’d simply click on a spoke on the wheel and it would generate a new wheel. This provides you not only with good ideas for your writing campaigns but also great LSI material for your writing. In essence, it takes a great deal of guesswork out of the whole business of SEO.
So Is Adwords Useless?
I like to use both services for finding keywords to target for my writing since I find that one or the other of them isn’t necessarily going to provide me with everything I’ll need. Basically, use Wonder Wheel as another tool as opposed to a replacement tool to do keyword research.
Getting to the Wonder Wheel
Since Wonder Wheel was originally intended as a way to make search easier as opposed to a way to help SEO specialists, it is disabled when you use Google Instant. The only way to get it back is to go to Google.com/preferences and then disable instant search. Then, do a search and under “more” you’ll see Wonder Wheel appear.